U.S. keeps out Honduran woman, who wants to hold dying daughter

Friday

If she makes it here, there will be long embraces and Honduran tamales.

If she makes it here, there will be long embraces and Honduran tamales.

There will be time to weep together and to remember. There will be comfort only a mother can provide.

Karla Mellon is dying. The 43-year-old North Side woman, mother of two boys, decided this fall that it was time to end treatment and live the rest of her days without the side effects of drugs that could never cure the ovarian cancer that has spread throughout her body.

What Mellon wants most is to be held in her mother's arms. She hasn't seen her in 13 years.

So far, though, the U.S. government has denied Cirila Maldonado's request to leave Honduras to visit Columbus.

The staff members of Hospice of Central Ohio who care for Mellon in her home have been trying for more than a month to make the reunion happen for the women.

Each time the hospice workers visit, they ask: "What is most important to you today?"

Mellon, consistently, has said that she wants to see her mother, said social worker Charla Sedziol.

The hospice wired $500 from its foundation to pay for paperwork and other fees and is prepared to pay for the flight. Mellon sent her mother almost $200 for other costs, including cab fare in Honduras to and from the U.S. Embassy.

The hospice assists families regularly with special needs or requests, but its quest to help Mellon has gone beyond the norm, Sedziol said.

"Everybody at my work is all fired up about this," she said.

They've asked U.S. Rep. Pat Tiberi's office for help and have called on a friend in the government. They've written to embassy officials to explain the circumstances. But nothing has worked. Last they heard, Maldonado is to reapply for a temporary visa next week.

"We're kind of hopeful, but not real hopeful," Sedziol said.

Calls to the U.S. Embassy in Honduras and to the Honduran Embassy in Washington were not answered yesterday.

Maldonado is 79 and has never left Honduras, where she juggled multiple jobs and raised eight children on her own after her husband died young. She lost another daughter (Mellon's sister, Gilma) to ovarian cancer three years ago.

Maldonado wants desperately to visit, said Mellon, who has been in the country legally since she married an American serviceman in the late 1980s. The two have since divorced, and Mellon is engaged to another man.

"I'm going to lose you, and I've got to see you," Maldonado has told her daughter. She has said she will hold Mellon in her lap and rub her hair, as she did when her daughter was little.

As Maldonado and her daughter understand it, the main obstacle has been a concern that she won't return to Honduras, that she'll stay here and look for work.

"My mom is 79. Why is my mom going to leave her comfy home to struggle?" Mellon said.

"I understand they want to take precautions, but I think how they did my mom was wrong. Wrong is wrong."

Mellon has wanted to make it back to Honduras for years but has been unable to afford the trip.

She was told she had ovarian cancer in early 2009. Surgery and chemotherapy proved unable to stop it. Eventually, she had to leave her job as a surgical technician with the Mount Carmel Health System.

"My trust is in the Lord Jesus. If he's going to heal me, he's going to heal me. If he's going to take me, he's going to take me," she said.

There are days that are better than others now, when one pain pill is enough to get her through the day and when she's able to eat more than a couple of pieces of bread. She's taken comfort in fiance Paul Nowlin's support and love and is enjoying a visit from her 20-year-old son, Michael, who lives in Minnesota. She calls the hospice team "angels."

Nowlin, who speaks to Maldonado on the phone, is eager to meet her.

"I just want to tell her that she has a wonderful daughter," he said.

Nobody knows how much longer Mellon has, Nowlin said, so it's important that the visit occur soon. "We want her to be able to enjoy her mom when she gets here."

Mellon's eyes closed and a smile spread across her face yesterday as she remembered the taste of lovingly prepared tamales, wrapped in banana leaves, so good she could eat them at every meal.

"She says, 'I will make them for you and spoil you like it used to be.'"

mcrane@dispatch.com

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